Huffington Post

After being called on a white lie he told during his Restoring Honor rally, Glenn Beck admitted Thursday that he stretched the truth because he "thought it would be a little easier."

Beck had claimed that he held George Washington's handwritten first Inaugural Address in his hands at the National Archives, but a spokeswoman at the institution said he did no such thing. Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and others called him out for the fabrication.

Thursday on his radio show, Beck copped to the lie. (RELATED: Lies By Prominent Americans.)

"I thought it would be a little easier in the speech," Beck said, than to go into the following elaborate explanation (via Mediaite):

Yesterday I went to the National Archives, and they opened up the vault, and they put on their gloves and then they put it on a tray. They wheeled it over and it's all in this hard plastic and you're sitting down at a table and you can't, because of Sandy Berger, I had a long conversation with him about this, you can't actually touch any of the documents, these are very very rare. So what they do, they have it in this plastic thing and they hold them right in front of you, you can't touch them but then you can say 'can you turn it over,' and then they turn it over for you and then you look at it. I thought it was a little clumsy to explain it that way.